Murphy: Simple gifts often the best

Shorebirds — blue herons and snowy egrets, along with the occasional seagull — arc across the sun-kissed surface of the Vernon River, a twisted ribbon of light glimmering in the waning sun. I watch the boaters come in one by one, white wakes trailing them.

And then I see Max.

Max is a young boy who loves to fish. He is sitting at the end of my dock, pole in hand. His eyebrows are all knotted up, lips pursed. He has something on the line.

Suddenly the line parts, whipping up towards the sky. He’s lost it, his glittering fish escaping into the olive swirl of the ancient river.

I stroll out to him. Armies of fiddler crabs scuttle out of my way. Minnows swim in tight circles in the shallows. Waves lap at the dock, kissing the barnacles as they sleep.

“Hey, Mr. Mark,” Max says, grinning.

He shows me his catch, housed in a battered plastic pail: a handful of shrimp, hauled in with a cast net; a couple of sea trout; a single pop-eyed mullet. It’s a reasonable haul for a Sunday afternoon.

I have my running gear on: a pair of new Gel Asics, my GPS, my iPod.

I bid Max a good evening and left the dock to circle through Rose Dhu.

There are no dogs in sight, which I am grateful for. The wind picks up just enough to shudder the palm trees a bit. They rattle like dry bones. I never simply hear that sound; I feel it, always, a hoarse chuckling someplace inside me.

The run goes well. I make it home after five miles, drenched in sweat. My nerves all jangly. But it’s a good jangly, a friendly hey-we’re-back-home jangly.

Daphne is kneeling in the yard in a floppy hat and oversize sunglasses. She’s wearing garden gloves, digging furiously at some leafy plant with a hand shovel.

I lean down to kiss her. She smiles sweetly at me, wrinkling up her nose.

“You need a shower,” she says.

“Very diplomatic, my dear,” I reply, smiling back.

As the sun burns its way into the horizon, we prepare our dinner. It’s often just the two of us now. We’re inhabiting the same space, breathing the same air. After a lifetime of family chaos, that might seem like too much contact, but it isn’t. The time together is precious. Dinner is a time to reconnect, to catch up. It’s the anchor to our day.

Daphne and I clean up the kitchen after eating and settle down to watch something on television. Sometimes, in the flickering half-light of the TV screen, we hold hands like a couple of middle school kids. This is always a profound comfort for me. It centers me, calming my soul and reaffirming my place in the universe.

Life, at its barest essence, is distilled into these small moments: conversation among friends, savoring a fine wine, the touch of a lover’s hand. But today’s world envelops us in a media whirlwind.

We are all too connected, too wired; indeed, we are so connected that we are disconnected. We text, e-mail and phone each other, wasting hours posting the inane and mundane on Facebook and Twitter, but we neglect those simple things that define us as human. The end result is that we exchange a virtual existence for the real thing. And then — too soon, always too soon — the hours become days, the days become years, and suddenly it is all over: our children grown, our breath gone ragged, our hearts spent.

As midnight approaches, I set the clock and turn out the light.

I kiss Daphne goodnight each evening, without fail, ever since the first time she had cancer. She’s had it twice. We rarely talk about it outright anymore. Still, the haunting specter of our own fragility is always there, like the proverbial monster under the bed. We are both aware we cannot take tomorrow for granted.

In this time of supercharged politics and global distress, it is a good thing to take stock of those things that really matter at the end of the day. And this is the stuff that matters: the love of one’s family, the Earth’s fragile beauty, the good memories of the day-to-day we take with us into eternity when we leave this place at last.

I thank God for these simple gifts.

For it is these myriad tiny splendid things that make all the difference in life.

Mark Murphy, M.D., is a Savannah physician, writer and author of a new book, “The Shadow Man.”